A new study refutes the idea that affirmative action does more harm than good for students.
That’s the findings included in a forthcoming article, scheduled to be published in Sociology of Education in the next few weeks. It comes amid the U.S. Supreme Court’s recent decision to send a case involving affirmative action back to the lower courts, ultimately making it harder for universities to use race as a factor in admissions.
The 7-1 decision in the case brought by plaintiff Abigail Fisher—a White student who was denied admission to the University of Texas—said that the lower court had to examine whether the university correctly used affirmative action to achieve diversity or whether it could use race-neutral criteria such as family income instead.
“The attainment of a diverse student body serves values beyond race alone, including enhanced classroom dialogue and the lessening of racial isolation and stereotypes,” U.S. Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in the majority opinion.
For years, opponents of affirmative action have argued that minority students admitted to highly selective schools tend to fall by the wayside and drop out at alarming rates.
But Dr. Eric Grodsky, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Dr. Michal Kurlaender of the University of California say that’s not true. Their research indicates that mismatched students of all racial backgrounds tend to do exceedingly well even though their grades and test scores are much lower than their counterparts.
To reach this conclusion, they tracked students enrolled in the UC system for four years, comparing their grades, credits and likelihood of dropping out to two groups: their better-prepared peers at elite UC campuses and students like them who chose to attend less competitive UC campuses.
